FOCUS ON

June 14, 1992|by R.W. APPLE JR., The New York Times

For months and years, he was all but invisible to the public, unless he made some foolish mistake. He was dismissed as a political cipher. People laughed at him in the spiteful way people laugh at the class geek.

But the wheel of electoral fortune has turned, and suddenly Vice President Dan Quayle is at the center of things.

Like it or not, Quayle has found ways to impress his views more sharply on the public consciousness than any other candidate for top office this year -- certainly far more vividly than the man he works for, George Bush, whose somnambulant behavior and cloudy message have given his vice president the chance to grab the spotlight.

What Quayle is trying to accomplish (it is far from clear whether he is making much headway) is the repair of the fraying coalition that elected Richard M. Nixon and Ronald Reagan and, in 1988, Bush and Quayle.

The key to that coalition was the group of voters who have come to be known as "Reagan Democrats" but who have, in fact, been voting Republican for president since they gave one last heave for their own party in 1964.

White, often eastern or southern European in origin, blue-collar or newly white collar, clustered in suburbs like Parma, Ohio, and Warren, Mich., and in urban quarters like South Boston and the Queens section of New York City, they flocked to the Republicans because economics mattered less to them than social issues such as busing, sexual permissiveness, drugs, long hair, patriotism, law and order.

They and their families cheered George C. Wallace when he derided the "pointy-headed intellectuals" who he said "couldn't park a bicycle straight" and applauded Spiro T. Agnew when he spoke about the "nattering nabobs of negativism" who he said dominated the press.

In 1992, those voters have been slipping away from Bush, partly because they feel he has betrayed them on taxes and on racial quotas, but also because the issues that Bush featured in 1988, largely through symbols -- patriotism through his visits to flag factories, law and order through the Willie Horton commercials -- have been declining in saliency.

Jobs, health care and education have come to the fore, and those are Democratic issues in most elections.

At the height of the dominance of social issues, in 1968, with a generation in rebellion, Hubert H. Humphrey almost snatched a victory at the last minute by refocusing many voters' attention on basic economic questions. Bush is highly vulnerable there this year.

So Quayle is trying to shift the focus back, playing the populist card as fervently as Ross Perot, who has caught the imagination of many of the Reagan Democrats in the last two months.

Unlike Perot, Quayle was born to privilege as the scion of a newspaper-owning family, but that has not stopped him from donning the robes of the common man determined to face down a "cultural elite" that mocks religion, family values and patriotism.

The White House did not seem quite prepared when the vice president attacked the heroine of the "Murphy Brown" television show, criticizing the character as if she were real for having borne a child out of wedlock. Bush and his aides gulped and fumbled when asked for a response, fearful perhaps that it was bad politics to tangle with so popular a show.

But Quayle and his advisers, notably William Kristol, thought otherwise and pressed on. Speaking to the Southern Baptist Convention in Indianapolis last week, he denounced sex education in primary schools, free condoms and homosexual parents, and spoke of warring American cultures.

"They'll try to mock us in newsrooms, sitcom studios and faculty lounges across America," he said. "I wear their scorn as a badge of honor."

No wonder. Journalists rank almost as low as politicians in opinion polls, college professors have always been suspect to many in this frontier-rooted nation, and few people have ever identified with Hollywood mores.

But different families have different values. Some exalt money, others exalt service. Some are religious, some are not. And some are opposed to abortion, like the vice president, but a larger number support it in some form.

A new survey for The Reader' Digest suggests that one thing setting family units apart from one another is their structure. Married people with children, the national poll discovered, are likely to be far more conservative, more opposed to abortion, less enthusiastic about women working outside the home and less tolerant of the idea of homosexual marriage than single persons or childless couples.

Abortion in many ways typifies the complexity of the issues that Quayle seeks for political purposes to simplify. He himself told The Washington Post a year ago, "I think people make a mistake trying to exploit it in the political realm."